The populist era

Today's central political demand is the self-determination and protection of territorial communities amidst the chaos of a failing neoliberal globalisation.

Since the Brexit vote and Trump's election as president of the US, it has become ever more clear that we are standing at a historical crossroads - one of those once-in-a-generation moments in which, in Hegel's words, 'the gradual crumbling' of the established order is 'cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world'.¹ The recent string of electoral victories for right-wing populist formations and candidates has not just made it clear that the neoliberal order is collapsing; it is also a signal that we are entering a new world, a new historical epoch, whose features - only half-illuminated by the flames in which the husk of neoliberal globalisation is being devoured - are significantly different from the world to which we have become accustomed in recent decades.

What is the nature of this new world? Does it give us cause for hope as well as fear? Is the much discussed populism that is emerging from the ruins of the neoliberal order simply a right-wing phenomenon, as it may seem given the prominence gained by the politics of hate of Trump and Le Pen? Or does it also bring its own possibilities for emancipation, as is suggested by left-wing populists such as Bernie Sanders in the US and Podemos in Spain?

To understand the present historical conjuncture we need to look at it as a time of transition between two different political eras, an interregnum, in which 'the old is dying, and the new cannot be born', to use the words of Antonio Gramsci that are so frequently quoted these days.² The old that is dying is in this case the neoliberal era; while the new period that is gradually coming to light amidst painful travails is the populist era - one in which populism is going to become the dominant political narrative on both the right and the left, given that the neoliberal centre can no longer hold.

The financial crash of 2007-8 - the turning point for contemporary history - has not only led to widespread economic hardship. It has been a fatal wound to the whole world view of neoliberalism, with its entrepreneurialism, its cult of the self-regulating market and its vision of a borderless and interconnected world bereft of state controls. This ideological crisis has ushered in, across a number of countries at the centre of the capitalist system, and in particular in Europe and the US, a 'populist moment', or a 'populist zeitgeist' as it has been alternatively described: a time when the new political phenomena that are emerging to fill the void left by the crisis of establishment parties - which have all converted to the neoliberal dogma - all seem to bear the mark of populism.³ In this post-neoliberal phase, populism appears in the guise of a tendency that cuts across divisions of right and left; and as a logic that is shared by forces that wage their attack on the neoliberal establishment from opposite sides: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain, UKIP and Corbyn in the UK.

Confronted with this surging populist wave, neoliberal elites in Europe and the US are in despair about what they see as 'populism, populism everywhere'. Populism is truly emerging as the dominant trend of contemporary politics. However, we seem as uncertain as ever about what is actually meant by the term.

This confusion stems from its long and often vexed history: in recent decades populism has often been used as a catch-all term for any anomalous or pathological phenomenon; it is seen as originating in the so-called 'sickness of Europe' - the racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia of its many right-wing populist parties. Yet, this pejorative view seems of little use at a time when, far from being a marginal anomaly, populism seems set to become the hegemonic political logic - and one that manifests itself not only in the ugly face of...